Elliot Ackerman’s ‘Green on Blue’

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By Tom Bissell

Feb. 27, 2015

In 1971, with the war in Vietnam ferociously stalemated, David Halberstam published a biography of North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, who had died two years earlier. Books about the enemy are typical in times of war. What was atypical about “Ho” was its fawning tone: “In his lifetime,” Halberstam wrote, “Ho had not only liberated his own country . . . he had touched the culture and soul of his enemy.” It’s a pretty lousy biography by any measure, every page a basket of freshly picked cherries, but for many historians on the right it’s still viewed as traitorous rot — as if Ernie Pyle had written, in 1943, “Goebbels: A Celebration.”

Elliot Ackerman, whose five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him highly decorated, has done something that, on the face of it, seems even more audacious: Ackerman’s first novel, “Green on Blue,” is told entirely through the eyes of Aziz, a young Afghan. The lone American to appear in the novel, a Special ­Forces type named Mr. Jack, is a sinister figure — and the object of one of the book’s most cunningly devastating descriptions: “His shalwar kameez still held the creases from where it’d been folded in plastic packaging.” The book’s title comes from a military term for violence between Afghan and American forces, which probably tells you all you need to know about Aziz’s ultimate opinion of Mr. Jack.

One can already imagine the response from critics beholden to the imperatives of identity politics: In imagining Aziz’s story, Ackerman has committed an act of cultural appropriation. When it comes to judging creative work, identity politics is the revenge of the intellect upon the imagination — the perfect lens for someone who knows everything about art except what it’s for. Virtually every artist interested in what’s beyond our “tiny skull-sized kingdoms” (to use David Foster Wallace’s phrase) is guilty of appropriation. Would that it happened more often; if Ackerman’s novel is any indication, there would be fewer wars if it did.

Obviously, the war in Afghanistan has been confusing for Americans. One of the most useful things Ackerman accom­plishes in “Green on Blue” is demonstrating how confusing it’s been for Afghans. In the book’s most moving section, an older, destitute man named Mumtaz tells Aziz about life in the early 1970s, before the first Soviet incursions, when Mumtaz’s father was a trucker who freely traveled to Isfahan, Lahore and Tashkent.

A suite of 1960s-era Afghanistan photos occasionally makes the rounds on social media, depicting lovely city parks, Afghan women in fashionable skirts, packed college classrooms and Kabuli Boy Scouts. This surprises those who know nothing of Afghanistan’s relatively recent descent into violence. The Soviets killed a million Afghan civilians in the 1980s, often with brightly colored ordnance designed to attract children. In 1989, factions within Afghanistan’s victorious mujahedeen resistance were shelling one another only weeks after the Soviet withdrawal. The Taliban were never merely “Islamo­fascists” carrying the banner of Allah. They were young men created by orphanhood’s privations and deranged by ready access to weapons. This lends a terrible poignancy to Mumtaz’s words about his boyhood: “Know these stories so we can remember a way that is different than now.”

Aziz, too, is a war orphan. Initially pressed into fighting for an American-funded militia, he learns how bewilderingly intertwined it is with the enemies it’s ostensibly trying to kill. He fights to keep his bomb-wounded brother safely cared for in a distant hospital, paid for by one of his many shadowy handlers. The mysteries pile up. Militants shell a town only to miss it on purpose. Aziz’s commander orders his soldiers to drive down roads he neglects to inform them have been mined by their enemies. As one unrepentant, war-profiting militant tells Aziz: “The only way this ends is if I leave and if all those who wish to fight leave. Peace will not come through us.” Eventually, Aziz understands the “true nature” of the war, with its poison handshakes and mudslide loyalties: “It had no sides.”

The chief pleasures of Ackerman’s novel derive from its striking descriptions of men at war. Aziz and some of his comrades are said to smile “the way small men do when they satisfy a great one.” When Aziz shoulders a mounted machine gun, “it felt like a man I didn’t know was holding a knife against my bare chest.” When a gun is pointed at him, Aziz notes the “peculiar itch in my spine” the event occasions. That a novelist with a Silver Star and a Purple Heart would render the sensations of soldiering so acutely is not, perhaps, terribly surprising. Yet elsewhere Ackerman’s prose is doled out like meager rations indeed: The “flat crunch” of one man punching another is said to have “echoed down the ravine,” which seems drawn from a more sensationalist work, and Aziz describes his suffering brother in similarly melodramatic terms: “His eyes rolled. He breathed, panting.”

A more difficult judgment to make, if only because of its utter subjectivity, is how convincingly Ackerman inhabits Aziz’s mind. I can say that after I finished “Green on Blue” I pondered my own brief 2001 excursion in Afghanistan, among Northern Alliance guerrillas with whom I could speak a bit thanks to my Peace Corps Uzbek. I recalled a magnitude more God talk from those men — for whom “God willing” functioned, essentially, as a comma — than Ackerman allows his otherwise traditional-minded narrator. While Aziz speaks of attending a madrasa, his ruminations on his surroundings often come across as familiarly, even fussily, sensitive. We know this voice. It is the voice of a literary novel’s narrator.

Whenever Aziz seems altogether too decent to be a young soldier prospering within a brutal war, Ackerman reminds us of Pashtunwali, the violently retributive code of honor that drives Aziz and many Pashtuns. It’s unclear how many readers will feel they have additional insight into Pashtunwali’s demand for revenge murder after reading this novel, but in Ackerman’s defense additional insight might well be impossible. “It is what it is” could have been coined to describe its ancient eye-for-an-eye ethics.

Like all novels written in skilled, unadorned prose about men and women of action, this novel will probably be compared to Hemingway’s work. In this case, how­ever, the comparison seems unusually apt. Aziz’s brother is afflicted with the same unmentionable wound that Jake Barnes suffers from in “The Sun Also ­Rises”: “To be crippled as he was,” Aziz says, “takes all of a man.” Today, Hemingwayesque notions of honor and manhood are ridiculed — often deservedly — as the luxuries of unexamined privilege (at best) and the abysmal bequests of toxic masculinity (at worst). One could argue that wars are largely fueled by misshapen notions of honor and manhood. For this reason, many of the best American war novels of the last 50 years have been black-comic fantasias going diligently after Cacciato.

But Ackerman, who fought there, ap­proaches the war in Afghanistan straightforwardly. He takes Aziz’s notion of honor seriously, dedicating his novel to a pair of Afghan soldiers he knows will probably not read it. While reading the first half of “Green on Blue,” I wrote things in the margins like “no jokes,” “where humor?” and “kinda po-faced.” I think I was looking for a leavening shot of absurdism — the thing that reassures us, as Westerners, that war is stupid, uncivilized and beneath us. Yet somehow we keep waging war in the non-ironist lands of people like Aziz, who I’m sure would enjoy cultivating their appreciation for the absurd were they not otherwise consumed with survival. Elliot Ackerman has done something brave as a writer and even braver as a soldier: He has touched, for real, the culture and soul of his enemy.

Tom Bissell’s ninth book, “Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve,” will be published next year.